David Hoffman Co-founder of Bankless, a media company covering Ethereum and crypto markets, and general partner of Bankless Ventures, an early-stage crypto investment fund he...

“My base case is that tokens are free in the future. And so the investment you want to make is, okay, if tokens are free, then what captures value? And Anthropic and ChatGPT and OpenAI and DeepSeek, they're going to have to answer that question. And right now, if you are selling tokens, it's a great business model. I don't know if that's going to be a great business model in 2030.”

Bankless · Crypto & Web3 · October 2026

Context

The hosts were discussing whether to buy into a reported Anthropic IPO at a valuation of $1.5 to $2 trillion. Hoffman had just said he is not a buyer and compared AI labs to the crowded layer-one trade in crypto; this is his core argument for why AI lab revenue may not last.

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Transcript

Bankless Around 1:09:18 into the episode

David Hoffman

It feels like 2021 when Ethereum block space was being sold for $70 a Uniswap trade. And there was so much infinite money to spawn the new layer one. And the new layer one was like owning the world. And that ended up actually not being the case at all. And commoditized blockspace

Ryan Sean Adams

commoditized. It got super

David Hoffman

commoditized. Like my base case is that tokens are free in the future. And so the investment you want to make is like, okay, if tokens are free, then what captures value? And Anthropic and ChatGPT and OpenAI and like DeepSeek, they're going to have to answer that question. And right now if you are selling tokens, like it's a great business model now. I don't know if that's going to be a great business model in 2030.

Speaker 3

I think you're right, but it might take a reset for that to happen as it did in crypto, which is like, this could still run for a while and then boom, reset. And then everything kind of like comes back to the bottom. I'll buy it then. Not a buyer then. There you go. On the

Ryan Sean Adams

week.

David Hoffman

Bankless Nation. You know what the deal is. Crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in, but this is the frontier. It's not for everyone. And we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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